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Foreshadowing
Genre
Explanation and Analysis:
Hard Times is written in the realist style, a movement to which Dickens contributed a great deal (most of his novels after David Copperfield are considered realist). Literary realism began in the mid-nineteenth century in France and consisted of literature which focused on the lives of working, provincial, or middle class people, portrayed with as little romance or bias as possible. There are some sentimental and fantastic elements to Dickens’s style, but his unflinching criticism of working conditions in factory towns, as well as the book’s unhappy conclusion (with Louisa and Tom emotionally damaged beyond repair by their father) are characteristic of Realist fiction.
It is also important to note that Dickens’s novel functions as a work of satire. Hard Times satirizes Utilitarianism, a philosophy created by the late 19th-century scholars Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Utilitarianism upholds that actions are morally correct so long as they are useful to some end, or benefit the majority of people in a given society. Utilitarianism encompasses a vast set of doctrines, beliefs, and works produced by a number of scholars; it is a philosophical tradition in itself. In this book, Dickens is focusing on making fun of thinkers who place utility or expediency above the emotions, thoughts, imagination, and desires of an individual.
Within the British Realist school, there is an informal category or sub-genre known as the “condition of England'' novel. Springing up in the 1840s and onward, these were novels which addressed specific social ills in England at the time, and tried to portray them honestly to capture public interest and motivate social change. Hard Times, as well as Dickens’s Nicholas Nickelby, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, and Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, among others, fell into this category.
